On the eve of his 90th birthday a scholarly bachelor decides to give himself a wild night of love with a virgin, in this latest novel from the Nobel Prize–winning author of One Hundred Years of Solitude. He telephones madam Rosa Cabarcas who, 20 years earlier, had found all his lovers for him—he has only ever had sex with prostitutes—and she, rising to the challenge, finds Delgadina, a young woman of 14. But, exhausted from raising her siblings and earning a wage for her family, Delgadina is asleep when the bachelor arrives. Lying next to this sleeping beauty, the nonagenarian begins to feel the stirrings of love for the first time in his life.

"Flashes of García Márquez's brilliant imagery—the sleeping girl is 'drenched in phosphorescent perspiration'—illuminate the novella, and there are striking insights into the euphoria that is the flip side of the fear of death."—Publishers Weekly